Space mission design and analysis is typically performed to determine constellations that can meet the greatest number of mission requirements at the least possible cost. During this process, coverage of candidate constellations is often matched to peak traffic needs at specified locations. Traffic needs, however, could be highly correlated with local time as exemplified by the daily telephone traffic which peaks during the 9:00 a.m. to 5:00 p.m. period. Synchronization of the constellation with local time, thus, can increase the resource utilization significantly.
Several existing orbits, such as Sun-synchronous orbits, Molniya orbits, etc., do synchronize the exact passing of the subsatellite point of each individual satellite over a predetermined location at certain predetermined local times. However, there is no general systematic approach to synchronize coverage of an entire satellite constellation, which may consist of more than one satellite, with local time.